Do the Hustle

If nothing else (and there’s plenty else), American Hustle is a tribute to the redemptive power of cleavage, from the dagger plunge of Amy Adams’ dry-cleaner discards to Jennifer Lawrence’s rolling out the big guns to Elisabeth Rohm’s bring-it-home-to-mama bodaciousness as Dolly Polito, who’s married to Jeremy Renner’s rockabilly hairpiece. It’s a testament to director David O. Russell’s green thumb with the cast that Rohm shows more expressive range and oomph in her fleeting minutes in American Hustle than she did all those seasons frostily chipmunking on Law & Order. As a sexy, bored stay-at-home mom with a flair for triggering small fires. Jennifer Lawrence seems to crowd the camera, exemplifying more brash woman than the timid world can handle, and she launches herself into the world slightly off-kilter, a series of collisions waiting to happen. Though American Hustle is set in the 70’s, it often sounds off with a 1930s mouthiness, and Lawrence’s line readings are a cross between Jean Harlow and other white satin bombshells and the brash, bratty heroines of 70s mob movies. It is Amy Adams however who is the film’s prow cutting through the clutter of 70s bad-taste decor and chunky appliances, pinning each closeup like a struck arrow quivering in the bullseye, the movie’s central compeller. Whereas her partner in crime Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale, in a rare, non-glaring role) is a figure of conspicuous furtiveness, fidgeting with his tinted aviator glasses beneath a camouflage helmet of comb-over hair and glue-on pelt, pushy and yet receding at the same time, Adams’ Sydney Prosser gleams like scissors. She brings to the screen a clarity, focus, air of expectancy, and ability to delay gratification and demand her due (“You are nothing to me until you’re everything,” she tells Irving, the movie line of the year) that gives her moments of letting go a true exaltation. Albert Goldman described disco as an ecstasy machine and the scene when Adams and Bradley Cooper (a highly strung FBI agent whose hair curlers may be a bit too tight) bust out their Saturday Night Fever moves at Studio 54, any reservations one may have about the movie--its lumpy pacing in spots, its theme-underlining dialogue--burst like the skin of a circus drum, capped by Sydney having a triumphant, howling pee in Studio’s overcrowded bathroom while angry women pound at the stall door. As a cinematic exclamation point, that must be something of a first.

Unlike so many films this year, American Hustle doesn’t ache for pantheon greatness or set about to teach audiences a punitive lesson, intent instead on showing them a good time at a very high, slummy level, flirting with kitsch and retro chic. No, it isn’t up there with Boogie Nights, but it may wear better as entertainment (art isn’t everything),and it has Amy Adams, who’d get my award for best actress of 2013, if I had one to give.